The first detailed report on my recent building spree covers
Dave Graffam Models' Coach House (curerntly a 'Copper Best Seller' and a 'pay-what-you-want' product on Wargames Vault).
In my last post on a Dave Graffam Models' (DGM) build (
dave-graffam-models-5-low-ruins ) I said that I was using 2mm board as a building material. Since then, however, I've become disenchanted with that as it looked too thin next to 28mm models. I've now started using 5mm foamboard for the walls instead (which looks much better IMO!), although I still use 2mm board for roofs.
As you may be aware, DGM use the 'layers' functionality in Adobe Acrobat to provide the builder with many different options for the model's surface finish and placement of doors and windows. For this version of the Coach House, I decided on the 'brick' finish and not to use the 'Coach Door'.
In the first pic to the left you can see the north wall of the model. I've cut through the foamboard to create openings where the windows and doors appear on the prints of the model and coloured in the exposed white foam with a permanent black marker
To the right is a pic of the building's southern wall, again with the windows cut out, although the one at the peak of the wall was too small to bother with IMO.
The unfortunate thing about DGM buildings is that they do not come with any interior detail at all, so if you want to use the interior, you need to come up with something to use there. This pic shows what I've done. The wooden flooring is from DGM's
Low Ruins Set, while the interior walls are the Coach House's walls with no 'wall' layer selected. This gives an off-white finish to the wall with green and grey streaks that - to me anyway - looks like a neglected plaster finish. It's far superior to leaving it as bright white foamboard anyway! You can also see that I've 'framed' the openings in the walls with black marker
This second pic of the interior shows what I've done with the first (or second if you're American) floor. With previous builds, I'd made a removable floor (as you can see at the end of this post -
dave-graffam-models-1-pub), but, through use, I'd found that unsatisfactory (constantly having to remove it to get to the ground floor and having it discarded on the table when not used, being 2 reasons). So now, I've decided to make a platform from 2mm board that I rabbeted into the foamboard wall where there are windows and covered it with bits of the low ruins floor piece. I hope that this solution will be more satisfactory.
This final pic shows the interior of the ground floor. You can see that I've not made any furniture for the build, nor do I intend to. It struck me as I was beginning this series of builds that my aim is not to create detailed model buildings, but rather create terrain for wargames - hence the lack of furniture. Following this logic, I am unsure at present whether or not to put doors on the buildings ... I might do so as they could be useful for zombie games - i.e. to indicate if the door is shut or not.
I think that I will (at some point!) build another version of this building actually as a Coach House! :)
